Autobiographical Texts Research Articles

TRANSGRESSIVE LANGUAGE OF POSTMODERNIST AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: INTERTEXT AND METALEPSIS

Background. Intertext and metalepsis in the proposed study are considered as the phenomena of transgressive poetics, means of creating the ontological dimension of an artistic text and tools for textualization of life. Transgressive language contributes to the correction of preconceived notions about postmodernism, facilitate the disclosure of changing nature of autobiography by revealing and analyzing internal contradictions − the amphibology of meaning. Self-generated paradoxes are revealed in the pluralized text due to metalepsis that registered dissolving borders between the levels of narration − author (reality), narrator (extra-diegetic), narratee (intra-diegetic) and intertextuality that creates an ambivalent space for co-existing multilayered experiences . The pronouns «I», «he», «they», constantly alternating, refer to each other, preventing the re-creation of an unambiguous original signified, i.e. a real biographical author who created an autobiographical text − the basis of the genre of autobiography. 
 The purpose of the article is to analyze the role of intertext and metalepsis in creating an autobiographically transgressive text on the example of a novel by the postmodernist writer Stephen Dixon.
 Methods. The poststructuralist approach in the context of literary theory along with elements of intertextual, narrative, stylistic analysis was used. 
 Results. The study of the peculiarities of transgressive language in the autobiographical postmodernist writing shows that Dixon's I-texts are sustained in the parameters of a classic novel: there is neither hypertextuality nor open polemical intertextuality. However, the transformation of the artistic matter of literature and the nature of autobiography is multifaceted and noted at all levels of the text. 
 Discussion. Dixon’s innovations lie in the further transformation of the modus of the author's presence, begun by Modernists. The artistic strategy of transgression of the experience of classical autobiography, applied by Dixon, is embodied in using the reconceptualized stylistic devices. One of them is ontological metalepsis that reveals transgressive dynamics on all levels of artistic conventions and, above all, the boundaries of fiction and reality in the act of creativity. The representative texts of the American writer reveal the growing sense of the thinning line between language and reality in the autobiographical prose of recent decades. This is accompanied by the development of innovative breakthroughs to reflect one's life experience, dictated by the existential need to restore ties with the material, which runs into the ambivalence of language structures.

Can AI Models Summarize Your Diary Entries? Investigating Utility of Abstractive Summarization for Autobiographical Text

Journaling is a widely adopted technique, known to improve mental health and well-being by enabling reflection on past events. Large amounts of text in digital journaling applications could hinder the reflection process due to information overload. ive summarization can solve this problem by generating short summaries to quickly glance at and reminisce. In this paper, we present an investigation of the utility of large language models in the context of autobiographical text summarization. We study two approaches to adapt a self-supervised learning (SSL) model to the domain of autobiographical text. One model employs transfer learning using our new autobiographical text summary dataset to fine-tune the SSL model. The second model leverages existing news datasets for high-quality text summarization mixed with our autobiographical summary dataset. We conducted mixed methods research to analyze the performance of these two models. Through objective evaluation using ROUGE and BART scores, we find that both these approaches perform significantly better than the SSL model fine-tuned with only high-quality news datasets, showing the importance of domain adaptation and autobiographical text summary dataset for this task. Secondly, through a subjective evaluation on a crowd-sourcing platform, we evaluated the summaries generated from these models on various quality criteria such as grammar, non-redundancy, structure, and coherence. We found that on all criteria, these summaries score >4 out of 5, and the two models show comparable results. We deployed a proof-of-concept web-based journaling application to assess the practical real-world implications of incorporating abstractive summarization in a digital journaling context. We found that the participants showed a high consensus that the summaries generated by the system captured the main idea of their journal entry (80% of the 75 participants gave a Likert scale rating of out of 7.0, with the overall mean rating of 5.56 ± 1.32) while being factually correct, and they found it to be a useful feature of a journaling application. Finally, we conducted human evaluation studies to compare the quality of the summaries generated from a commercial tool ChatGPT and mixed distribution fine-tuned SSL model, and present insights into these systems in the context of autobiographical abstractive text summarization. We have made our model, dataset, and subjective evaluation questionnaire openly available to the research community.

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

Das ,Ich‘, das ,Sie‘ und das ,Du‘ in Ernst Jüngers norwegischen Reisetagebuch Myrdun (1943)

Abstract In the sixth volume of Min kamp, Karl Ove Knausgård focuses on the European male generation that was significantly shaped by World War I. Knausgård also mentions the Lieutenant and later author Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), whose early autobiographical texts show only a perception of the self – but not a perception of the other. Based on Knausgård’s observation, this article examines to what extent a shift in perspective can be observed in Jünger’s travel literature, which was written during his time in Romsdal (Eidsbygda). This genre provides a promising subject for investigation, as writing about the other requires the physical presence of the other in direct confrontation.

Relacje polsko-niemieckie piórem malarza spisane na podstawie Pamiętników Juliana Fałata (1935) i Wspomnień Wojciecha Kossaka (1913/1973)

This article is an analysis of two autobiographical texts by famous Polish painters of the turn of the century: Julian Fałat’s Pamiętniki (Diaries) from 1935 and Wojciech Kossak’s Wspomnienia (Reminiscences) from 1913. These texts constitute a source of information not only about the life of Polish artists at the imperial court in Berlin, but also a treasury of historical knowledge about the moods prevailing in the Wilhelmine era, the Polish–German relations in particular. In both texts, the most important figure is that of the German emperor, his involvement in the affairs of art and concern for the fate of outstanding Polish painters. The analysed texts allowed, above all, for showing the difficulties in Polish–German relations at the turn of the century, the ambivalence of the German emperor in relation to the Polish issue and individual Poles, and the difficulties of Polish artists in maintaining the balance between being the court painter of the German emperor and a Polish patriot.

Theorising Lebano-Pathography: A Biographical Exploration of Medical-Cultural Pathologies

ABSTRACT To introduce the special issue on illness writing in Lebanon, I theorise Lebano-pathography as a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, (i) narrative intervention (form/method) that does not depoliticise the traumatic subject. Simultaneously, it is (ii) a body of writing (text) that seeks to illuminate the different ways one can be ill, and try to recover, in present-day Lebanon. While somatic manifestations of illness and their concomitant patient accounts are central to previous research in narrative medicine and illness writing, Lebano-pathography underscores a more versatile interpretation of illness encompassing cultural practice and/or clinical disease, and exploring in critically informed autobiographical text the two illness categories’ causal interrelationship. In the backdrop of the cadaverous political grid and economic tensions rending the country since the national tragedy of the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port, this volume unpacks the following thematic clusters: (1) Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex; (2) The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure; (3) Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia; (4) The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma; and (5) Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health.

‘Again the Same Hopeless Feeling’: Christian Queer Activism as a Personal Experience in Finland, 1960s–2000s

AbstractLGBTQ people and the Evangelical Lutheran Church have a long history of tension in Finland. Christian queer activists have fought this tension since the late 1960s. This article asks how Christian queer activism was born and personally experienced in Finland from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. Theoretically, this article builds on queer history and affect theory. My data contains autobiographical texts and oral history interviews of the activists and their contemporaries, as well as statements by the Church, newspaper articles and a TV debate that help to contextualise the personal activist narratives. Using the method of close reading, I pay attention to affective circulation and moments in which activism emerged or started to decline. I argue that a wide circulation of negative affects attached to homosexuality in Finland in this era created an atmosphere that both inspired Christian queer activists to act, but as time went on, also caught them up in political despair when nothing seemed to change, making them reorient their activist hope.

Языковая личность автора в метатекстовой перспективе автобиографического дискурса

The aim of the research is to determine the communicative and pragmatic specifics of implementation of a linguistic personality’s linguocreative competence in autobiographical discourse through metatextual inclusions. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering B. L. Pasternak’s autobiographical discourse as a semiotic-pragmatic phenomenon, which makes it possible to qualify the author’s linguistic personality as not only elitist, but also discursive, focused on a constant dialogue with the reader. This dialogue is capable of turning into polyphony on the basis of the author’s comparison of his current self with his past self, as well as due to the broad inclusion of the author’s evaluation of various cultural facts in the semantic space of autobiographical texts. As a result, it has been found that metatext in B. L. Pasternak’s autobiographical discourse is characterised by a set of functions, among which the text-forming and structure-forming functions, as well as the aesthetic fiction are of prime importance. The author employs various linguistic ways of metatext realisation – such are lexemes and lexical combinations with the meaning of speech, thought, creativity, subjunctive mood forms, parenthetical words and constructions, while metatext itself in B. L. Pasternak’s prose is mainly innective.

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard.

The functions of toponyms in the works by K. F. Zhakov

Introduction. In Finno-Ugric studies, as well as in Komi linguistics, the language of fiction is insufficiently studied, including the functions of toponyms in prose. At the beginning of the XX century in Russia, the writer Kallistrat Falaleevich Zhakov was widely known. At the same time, he also studied Komi and Finno-Ugric linguistics. The onomastic material of the works by K. F. Zhakov has not yet attracted the attention of researchers of his works, although toponymic vocabulary plays a special role in the artistic picture of the writer’s world. Materials and Methods. The research is based on the books by K. F. Zhakov “To the North, in search of Pam Bur-Mort” and “Through the system of life”. When writing the article, traditional methods of linguistic research, used in the analysis of toponyms, were applied: descriptive, comparative-historical, semantic, etc. Results and Discussion. The research value of the works is based on the fact that the geographical names of K. F. Zhakov artistic and semantic meaning of the connection with the past and eternal, present and future spiritual space of the North. The geographical environment determines the entire structure and storylines of the books. The action in them directly depends on the spatial movements of the hero, and the toponyms form the core of travel. The works can be considered as a single autobiographical text. “To the North, in search of Pam Bur-Mort” and “Through the system of life” are the books of wanderings. The main rhythm of the story is created by geographical names. The article presents oikonyms, oronyms and hydronyms from two works of the writer. Conclusion. In the texts of two works of fiction by K. F. Zhakov analyzed in this paper, real toponyms perform two main functions: informative and artistic-symbolic.

La scène littérale et la scène textuelle : les espaces de présentation de soi dans les écritures personnelles des danseuses

Cet article se propose de comparer la scène littérale et la scène textuelle dans des textes de nature autobiographique de deux anciennes danseuses classiques françaises, à savoir Danseuse étoile (2016) d’Agnès Letestu et La femme qui danse (2008) de Marie-Claude Piétragalla, afin d’élucider comment l’espace de présentation de soi influe sur l’image de soi qu’une personne peut donner d’elle-même. En nous inspirant principalement de la définition de la mise en scène proposée dans le Dictionnaire du théâtre (1996) de Patrice Pavis et des concepts d’autorité et de vocation énonciative chez l’analyste du discours Dominique Maingueneau, l’article identifie d’abord les éléments d’interprétation qui sont propres à la scène textuelle et à la scène littérale, ainsi que leur agencement au sein de chaque espace. Ensuite, il est question de montrer comment la mise en scène textuelle et la mise en scène littérale établissent chacun un espace de présentation de soi distinct, en prescrivant le discours que la danseuse peut tenir au sein de chaque espace. L’article constate finalement que la même danseuse qui se présente sur la scène textuelle et sur la scène littérale ne peut que présenter deux images différentes d’elle-même, car elle est tenue d’agir selon la mise en scène, c’est-à-dire l’agencement des éléments d’interprétation, propres à chaque espace.

Nation, Nationalism, and Womanhood in Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir

Nationalism as a concept gives rise to dogmatic notions of loyalty and allegiance to one’s nation. Ever since the consolidation of the idea of nation-states, the issue of allegiance to the nation has played out differently for men and women. Traditionally, men are responsible for defending the borders of the nation, while women look after the home and the hearth and propagate the prescribed ideals of the nation-state. Consequently, the importance placed on going out to war and the sacrifices made for the sovereignty of the nation and nationhood frames the discourse surrounding the conditions and effects on masculinity and the idea of manhood in general. However, a study of this nexus of religion, nationhood, and identity in allegiance to one’s nation-state from the perspective of femininity and its effects on womanhood in general could showcase how women living in a contested land suffer both direct and indirect effects of the conflict. The autobiographical text by Farah Bashir, Rumours of Spring (New Delhi: Fourth Estate, 2021), showcases the strategies and tools through which women navigate such restrictive spaces. This coming-of-age story in the conflict-torn sociocultural fabric of Kashmir negotiates with varying definitions of nation-states, lending the narrator the scope to negotiate the multiple threads of gender, religion, and identity sewn into the fabric of the macrocosmic nation.

Introduction

The introduction provides context for the correspondence of Marianne Angermann-Bielschowsky and the journal entries of her mother, Charlotte Angermann. These autobiographical texts deal with the experiences of Marianne Angermann-Bielschowsky and her husband, the German-Jewish physician Franz Bielschowsky, during the Spanish Civil War in Madrid, and those of her mother in Dresden, Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Marianne travelled to Madrid in late 1935 to take up a position at the Institute of Medical Research, led by Professor Carlos Jiménez Díaz, at the University of Madrid. She had been preceded by her future husband, Franz, who began collaborating with Jiménez Díaz in late 1933 after he had been dismissed from his post at Freiburg University. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Marianne and Franz worked at Military Hospital No. 6 at Chamartín de la Rosa in Madrid. At the end of the Spanish conflict they managed to get entry visas for the United Kingdom where they held research positions at Sheffield University under Professor H. Green. Marianne's mother, Charlotte, a pensioner, spent the Second World War in Dresden with her husband, Konrad. Her journal entries record the everyday travails of life on the home front in Nazi Germany. She records what she hears from her friends and family in Germany who had been subjected to the Allies' Area Bombing Campaign and she writes of her own experiences of the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. The Soviet occupation of Dresden in 1945 and early 1946 forms another strand in her entries.

“Motivated To Teach, but Stressed Out by Teacher Education”: A Content Analysis of Self-Reported Sources of Stress and Motivation Among Preservice Teachers

Strong evidence exists for the high vocational calling reported by candidate teachers, but also for the high rates of attrition early in the profession. Current approaches often explain this paradox by the stress associated with first teaching experiences (i.e., vocational stress processes). By contrast, the present study focuses on the stress experienced during teacher education (i.e., academic stress processes), by analyzing the sources of stress and motivation described in writing by French preservice teachers. Using systematic procedures for content analysis ( N = 106 autobiographical texts), major results suggest that preservice teachers are mostly motivated by their positive views of the teaching profession, but that the academic demands they face during teacher education challenge their motivation to pursue the career. Implications are drawn on ways to analyze and tackle academic stress processes, in an effort to support candidate teachers’ wellbeing and thus limit attrition rates.

«АВТОРСКОЕ СОЗНАНИЕ» И СМЫСЛОВОЙ ЦЕНТР АВТОБИОГРАФИЧЕСКОГО ПРОИЗВЕДЕНИЯ

The essence of the conceptual and figurative concept in linguistic and literary approach is studied. The conceptual-figurative concept is one of the units that fill the figurative-semantic system of the author. Its function in an autobiographical work is considered as a way of transmitting the author's consciousness, which is an organizing center that has a multi-level structure and a complex content of an artistic work. The role of the conceptual and figurative concept in the formation of the semantic center of the work is determined. The conceptual-figurative concept in an artistic autobiographical text is understood as a verbalized value-significant mental unit of an individual author's picture of the world. The unit under study is considered from two points of view: as a generally accepted knowledge and as a reflection of the author's subjective experience of experiencing reality.

The Lived Experiences of Students and Teachers with Disability in Keller’s and Wright’s Autobiographical Works

The study explores the lived experiences of students and teachers with disabilities inside schools/colleges while pursuing their studies and working in Hellen Keller’s The Story of My Life and Mary Herring Wright’s Sounds Like Home: Growing up Black and Deaf in the South. This study inquires what they have experienced and how they have made meanings from the campus phenomena. This research has utilized the disability studies theory, specially based on Alice Hall and Tobin Siebers, to interpret the selected autobiographical texts, and note-taking technique has been used to collect the required information from the autobiographical texts. The findings of the study are that the school/college infrastructures, practices, the executives’ attitudes are unfriendly, hostile and adverse to the students and teachers with disabilities while pursuing studies and working at schools/colleges. They suggest that the executives, administrators and other physically normal teachers and students can create the disabled-friendly physical, academic and social environment at the educational institutions if they slightly modify their attitudes and practices, and eliminate their conscious negligence to the needs of the disabled. The findings of the study can motivate the executives to enable physical and social (attitudes and practices) environment and service delivery, address the needs and demands of the disabled, and manage the required sources/materials and performance assessment system in schools/campuses.

(Sin)vergüenza: El amor del revés de Luisgé Martín a la luz de la teoría de los afectos

Abstract: This article offers a new reading of Luisgé Martín's autobiography El amor del revés (2016) through the lens of affect theory, building on the writings of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on shame and periperformative utterances. A methodological framework proposed by the Polish queer theorist Tomasz Basiuk is used here to compare the configurations of shame in Martín's autobiography with the rhetorical strategies in American gay men's life writings. Performances of shame are foregrounded in the analysis as a salient feature of El amor del revés , in order to argue that they serve as a means to overcome the homophobia internalized by the generations of men who grew up in Spain under Franco's dictatorship. Borrowing Basiuk's key deconstructionist concept, exposure, which conveys the risk taken by gay authors in their autobiographical texts, I posit that Martín writes socially engaged literature, and that in doing so he relies on the coming-out narrative model typical for gay autobiographies to tell the story of his life. Yet he uses rhetorical strategies that reveal the constructedness of the story and of his sexual identity.

Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914

Dead Men Telling Tales is a clever and ironic title for a book that examines how Napoleonic-era veterans (those who survived the war) wrote memoirs that strove to be legitimate histories and not just personal tales. Matilda Greig has assembled an impressive corpus of up to three hundred autobiographical texts from the Peninsular War (1808–14), in which Spanish guerrillas successfully repelled French invaders with the aid of British forces, dealing a decisive blow to Napoleon’s imperial ambitions. Her sources include French and British memoirs as well as lesser-known Spanish ones and a smattering of Portuguese works published throughout the nineteenth century. These provide an original and comparative angle on a familiar topic. By also integrating archival research on the publication of these books, Grieg is able to address broader questions about war memoirs as a genre and war veterans as their enterprising authors.Like others before her, Greig notes the unprecedented outpouring of autobiographical writings among veterans of the Napoleonic wars; unlike others, she is less interested in their reasons for writing than in the outcome, and in particular the material conditions in which war memoires were produced. Her central argument is that, for the first time, the experience of war was commodified and successfully sold to a large audience. This, she suggests, made war memoirs into a genre and turned soldiers into legitimate authors. To support these claims, Greig turns to book history and what she nicely calls “the secret lives of books”—all that had to happen behind the scenes for these texts to find their publishers and a growing readership. For sell they would, as publishers soon came to understand, enticing veterans to write and to take an active role in the production and marketing of their memoirs. What some disparagingly dubbed a bout of “scribblomania” developed, over the course of the century, into a vast repertoire of autobiographical writings with solid print runs, changing formats, new and enriched editions, imitations and parodies, and more or less successful spin-offs in travel and history writing (among other genres). The lives of these books lasted well beyond their authors’ deaths, implicating widows and descendants interested in keeping memories and royalties flowing. Whether these developments actually amount to the forging of a literary genre—and, moreover, one that “made a deep impression on nineteenth-century culture, memory, and literature, shaping the way multiple generations of readers imagined war” (3)—is something that this particular book cannot fully answer. To do so would have required more analysis of reader reception and, especially, of the formal qualities of these and subsequent writings. Greig is quite justified in not wanting to examine these sources purely for their factual content (as soldiers’ writings often are); but in failing to look closely at the texts themselves she glosses over significant differences between, for instance, letters, diaries, and memoirs drafted at various moments during and after the facts. If a genre’s form has a content, so does its content have a form.Dead Men Telling Tales is most convincing when studying Spanish war memoirs alongside better-known French and British ones. This is a significant contribution to the literature on Napoleonic-era memory. Greig shows how these autobiographical manifiestos developed a style of their own, influenced by petition-like juridical models handed down from the eighteenth century but equally polemical and argumentative in their postwar intent. Most were written in the immediate aftermath of the conflict and had to navigate a rapidly evolving political landscape and censorship laws. Little wonder, therefore, that Spanish veterans—whether aristocrats or guerrilleros—sought to frame the historical events they had taken part in, if necessary engaging in historiographical debates with accredited historians and official institutions. Here we see most clearly how veterans became true authors and not just war witnesses. Greig’s comparative analysis is often tentative, but the transnational approach does yield some important findings, not least a common willingness among veterans to document, for the first time, war’s more gruesome aspects and confront their participation in scenes such as those depicted in Goya’s celebrated Disasters of War. Some memoirs—French and British ones especially—circulated across borders, often in unofficial translations and publications that proliferated freely before the advent of international copyright legislation. Paradoxically, this circulation tended to solidify nationalist frames and different ways of interpreting, even naming the conflict: Peninsular War, Guerre d’Espagne, Guerra de la Independencia. Each had its particular narratives and stereotypes: lazy or savage Spaniards, evil French, perfidious Brits, a heroic “people’s war.” Greig reminds us that if the Napoleonic wars gave birth to what George Mosse famously called the “myth of the war experience,” this myth came in various shapes, sizes, and fonts. Specialists on this pivotal moment in the history of total and asymmetric warfare, and on veterans’ writings in general, will find Greig’s analysis of these texts very stimulating.

장년 필자의 쓰기 신념이 자전적 텍스트 쓰기 수행에 미치는 영향 연구

This study explores the effects of writing beliefs on a writer’s output. For this purpose, examining older patterns of writing beliefs and techniques was necessary. This helps search for positive improvements in writing beliefs through autobiographical text-writing activities of Internet writing cafes.
 Following are the results of this study. First, the average writing belief starts to decline around the middle age of an entire life cycle. Second, unlike students, variable measures are required to measure the distribution patterns of transmission and transactional writing beliefs of adult writers. Third, on a 5-point scale, the average writing belief was 3.7, which was higher than average, and the writing belief of citizen writers who authored autobiographies was a high 4.04. Fourth, a solidly positive association was found between writing belief and other writing sub-factors. The writing factor test and citizen writer belief test of the adult writer’s writing belief made the anticipation of a positive change in writing belief in adult writer’s autobiographical text writing performance possible.
 The examination of evolving writing beliefs in a person’s life showed that older writers prioritize participating in communication rather than transmitting accurate content. The result necessitates setting up internal and external communication spaces. These spaces can reflect the writing convictions and delivery process of mature writers, prone to being driven into the communication blind spot in social activities or interpersonal relationships after retirement.

Émigrés on an émigré: Poetic portraits of Chopin

This article is devoted to analysis of the mechanisms behind the creation of the cultural image of Fryderyk Chopin in selected verse by twentieth-century Polish poets in exile, such as Kazimierz Wierzyński, Jan Lechoń, Stanisław Baliński and Czesław Miłosz. Verse (and excerpts from autobiographic texts) by those poets helps to forge and renew the ‘Chopin legend’ in various ways, through references to the most important moments in the composer’s biography and selected features of his music. From analysis of this verse, we learn that these poets looked at Chopin and his music primarily through the prism of the role assigned to them by history – similar to the role in which Chopin had tried to find his bearings a hundred years earlier on his departure from Poland. The attitude adopted by émigré writers towards Chopin and his music, representing one of the most important symbols in Polish culture, is not unequivocal. Its distinct affirmation is accompanied by reflection on the conditions and limitations of émigré mythology. The poems discussed show the significant currency in émigré circles especially of that aspect of the Chopin legend which refers to the image of a distant and enslaved homeland. That currency distinguishes the émigrés from their peers back home, who wished to see a different symbolism in Chopin and his music, especially one that was free from conventionalised patriotic references. This last observation may also be referred to the analysed poem by Miłosz, which from the proposed comparative perspective comes across as the reverse of the other works discussed in the article. An interesting perspective could no doubt be opened up by comparative studies of a broader scope, showing how this theme functioned and was functionalised in the output of foreign writers, within the constellation of other cultural, social and historical relations.